It seems incontrovertible to me that there is a global warming effect and that it is going to be serious, probably not in the amount of, say, six degrees warming, but it's likely that we'll get two to three degrees warming and that will be serious enough.

Listen, global warming is a real problem, but it' s not the end of the world. A 30-centimetre sea level rise is just not going to bring the world to a standstill, just like it didn't over the last 150 years.

Lots of people say we should fly less, heat less, and put on a sweater. But it's not going to happen. People are happy to say that for other people, but not themselves.

Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can't use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/AIDS prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation.

The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.

The main environmental challenge of the 21st century is poverty. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to consider the environment 100 years down the line.

The obvious issue is providing clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth at the cost of little more than one year of the Kyoto treaty.

The only thing that will really change global warming in the long run is if we radically increase the speed with which we get alternative technologies to deal with climate change.

The saddest fact of climate change - and the chief reason we should be concerned about finding a proper response - is that the countries it will hit hardest are already among the poorest and most long-suffering.

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

'The Skeptical Environmentalist' was much more the idea of the scientific argument of realizing that we need to be skeptical about a lot of these stories that we hear and to put them in context.

There is no doubt that we should take solar radiation into account. We have seen ground temperatures rising since 1975, and it is important to know to what extent that has been caused by the sun or by carbon dioxide.

There is no question that global warming will have a significant impact on already existing problems such as malaria, malnutrition, and water shortages. But this doesn't mean the best way to solve them is to cut carbon emissions.

Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.

To prepare adequately for the challenge of global warming, we must acknowledge both the good and the bad that it will bring. If our starting point is to prove that Armageddon is on its way, we will not consider all of the evidence, and will not identify the smartest policy choices.

To some, a cap-and-trade system might sound like a neat approach where the market sorts everything out. But in fact, in some ways it is worse than a tax. With a tax, the costs are obvious. With a cap-and-trade system, the costs are hidden and shifted around. For that reason, many politicians tend to like it. But that is dangerous.

We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.

We need to invest dramatically in green energy, making solar panels so cheap that everybody wants them. Nobody wanted to buy a computer in 1950, but once they got cheap, everyone bought them.

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.